Twitter DMs, now with 10,000 characters

On Twitter, you can open your direct messages to complete strangers and now, those very people can rile you up, woo you and abuse you over 10,000 characters, rather than the usual, piddling amount.

Great news for those who like to drunkenly ramble to someone they fancy, eh?

Twitter announced this months ago, but they've finally got around to doing it, presumably in a bid to go toe-to-toe with Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and a load of other messaging services.

Sachin Agarwal, Twitter’s DM product manager, said: “We believe that private messaging is a core part of the twitter experience. Where we see our advantage [over apps such as WhatsApp] is that there’s so much amazing content on Twitter already, that we want to enable people to have private conversations about those things.”

The reason this took a while, according to Agarwal, is to get all third-party apps up to speed as well: "What we didn't want was for it to be enabled for one client but not for others."

He continued: "One of the really interesting uses of DM is talking to business and getting customer support, and those are using third party clients. We have a number of partners that build clients for these businesses and so we wanted to make sure they had the time to update and be ready."

"Let’s say that I'm talking to a business and I write them a direct message that is 160 characters long and that business doesn't read the last 20, for me as a consumers that's a really bad experience. And that was how we looked at it, the users’ perspective, making sure they have a really great experience."